“I owe my interest in public education to Everett Reimer. Until we first met in Puerto Rico in 1958, I had never questioned the value of extending obligatory schooling to all people. Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school” (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1971, first sentence).
Obligation seems to be a core framing tool in the culture of public schools—a virtue, a veil, an excuse, a threat—the Swiss knife of the institution. Witness: "Our school's obligation to diversify mathematics classes is a testament to our commitment to academic equity in the interest of fairness and justice.” By the way, it meets funding requirements that prioritize minority representation. Two birds make lemonade.
Everett Reimer doesn’t have the name recognition of Ivan Illich, he of hidden curriculum fame, but Reimer had a fire in his belly that inspired Illich. As it happened, Reimer published the book School is Dead (1971) the same year Illich published Deschooling Society. To bring some spice to the stew, Paulo Freire published Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1971).
Below, you see the inspirational quote Reimer used for his book, plus more. On the left you thrice infer from the evidence that Reimer understood the factory model. On the right you synthesize evidence and prior knowledge to form the assumption that this book was respected enough to sit on a shelf in a resource center for scholars in a College of Education. Like the blacksmith forging the barbs for Ahab’s harpoon, the dramatic irony is sharp.
Perhaps the most important person in Margaret Mead’s early life was her paternal grandmother, Martha Adaline Ramsay Mead (1845–1927). “A widowed schoolteacher, Martha lived with her only son's family and was responsible for much of the children's education,” according to the webpage devoted to her at the Library of Congress. Martha believed keeping children indoors for long periods of time was harmful. It should come as no surprise that Margaret spent much time learning outdoors. Here is a sample of Martha’s anecdotal observations regardingMargaret's progress:
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Ivan Illich was pretty much in step with the radical mainstream of his colleagues during his time. His picking out Margaret Mead to cite as a thought mentor was apt. McCleod (2023) characterized the 1970s and its new sociology of education a bit like being situated in the uncomfortable position of having to bite its master’s hand—much like School Is Dead posing as a resource for teacher credential candidates: “[It] was interested in how education, and particularly schooling, far from ameliorating social divisions, worked to reproduce existing social inequalities.”
Teachers still find themselves in the jaws of this whale routinely, squeezed in the prong of a shapeshifting dilemma. How to teach with optimism in a factory? How not to wince when a school is called a factory? Why must teaching be so undervalued? Why are teachers expected to assign and grade learners? Illich harshly critiqued traditional education—factory model, banking model, mind-numbing mumbo jumbo model in a way that makes a teacher grateful for summer:
“The pupil is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His [sic] imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value….” (Illich, 1971, p.4).
Paulo Freire fed the flames of critical fires provoking existential debates about what might be done to humanize schooling, but without abolishing it or declaring it dead. While Illich argued for bulldozing the structure and rebuilding, Freire argued for reform from within using a particular pedagogy. In this excerpt Freire locates the grand bargain currently sustaining the banking concept of schooling in the students’ willingness to comply out of their fear of freedom, the risk of freedom learners face when they fail to comply with the prescription:
“One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual's choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the preservers consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor. The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom” (Freire, 1971, pp. 46-47).
Of course, Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed engaged the fearful, who would under good teaching shed the skin of the prescriber and grow their own, in a sort of auto-phenomenology to release fear and to deeply understand their value and humanity. They would then grasp in consciousness the essence of oppression in the action of the school:
“This is the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system” (Freire, 1971, p.72).
Illich was familiar with Freire (see Illich, 1971, p.15-17). Freire (1971), now a revered philosopher of emancipatory literacy and education, was a trainer of trainers in the quest to alter the banking model of teaching. In the following excerpt, Illich pointed out that the right to learn covers the learner’s freedom to have burning interests, suggesting that these interests fuel hard, tedious academic work:
“The Brazilian teacher Paulo Freire knows this from experience. He discovered that any adult can begin to read in a matter of forty hours if the first words he deciphers are charged with political meaning. Freire trains his teachers to move into a village and to discover the words which designate current important issues, such as the access to a well or the compound interest on the debts owed to the patron. In the evening the villagers meet for the discussion of these key word” (Illich, 1971, p.15).
In a way Freire saw the complete abandonment of schooling as Illich called for to be a Pyrrhic victory. Once schools are gone, then what? It may have been unclear where the human and physical resources to support teaching and learning would come from without a commitment from society. If schools could be reformed, schools could reverse themselves and become a part of human progress:
“The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be ‘hosts’ of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization” (Freire, 1971, p.47).
Illich took a dark and penetrating view of the violence of schooling which, intense and unblinking as it is, might have seemed to be motivated more toward destroying the “obligation to attend” than to provide a new means for learning. This is not to suggest that Freire was looking through rose colored glasses. Witness:
“The Vietnam war fits the logic of the moment. Its success has been measured by the numbers of persons effectively treated by cheap bullets delivered at immense cost, and this brutal calculus is unashamedly called ‘body count.’ Just as business is business, the never-ending accumulation of money, so war is killing, the never-ending accumulation of dead bodies. In like manner, education is schooling, and this open-ended process is counted in pupil-hours. The various processes are irreversible and self-justifying” (Illich, 1971, p.31).
As Illich deconstructs the veneer of public school leading to increasingly devastating critiques to support the abolition of the traditional system (like comparing body counts of dead soldiers to credit hours on transcripts and report cards), Freire interrogated aspects of pedagogy which might be ameliorated if the oppressed rise up and demand the right to learn, in the process converting professional educators, who may work within an imperfect system while doing all they can to diminish is damage:
“A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness” (Freire, 1971, p.72).
Illich penetrated more deeply into the irreconcilable nature of the problem and called for abolition in the hallowed space of an iconic education conference. This quote comes from chapter five titled “Irrational Consistencies.” Illich based this chapter on a presentation he gave at a meeting of the American Educational Research Association, in New York City, February 6, 1971:
“The ‘classroom practitioner’ who considers himself a liberal teacher is increasingly attacked from all sides. The freeschool movement, confusing discipline with indoctrination, has painted him into the role of a destructive authoritarian. The educational technologist consistently demonstrates the teacher's inferiority at measuring and modifying behavior. And the school administration for which he works forces him to bow to both Summerhill and Skinner, making it obvious that compulsory learning cannot be a liberal enterprise. No wonder that the desertion rate of teachers is overtaking that of their students” (Illich, 1971, p.77).
McCleod (2023) and a number of colleagues published five essays in one volume of an open source journal (Springer) discussing a plethora of researchers in the sub discipline of the new sociology of education during the 1970s. The 1980s saw a backlash in that the earlier critical sociologists focused on materialism and economics; the 1980s critiqued their blind spots—gender, race, language, etc.—without resolving the basic issue, that is, the role of the public school in reproducing social injustice.
Kahn and Keller (2007) addressed the question of “so what now”?
“…[W]e might wonder about the legacy of radical pedagogues like Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, and whether their struggles still live for the students of standardized curricula, whose schools are littered with corporate advertising and products, and who are themselves either tracked into broken-down buildings lacking adequate textbooks and materials or into a cut-throat competition for admissions’ placement that begins with preschool and continues on through college” (Kahn and Keller, 2007, p.431)
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AI systems can tailor educational content to individual students' needs, allowing for adaptive learning experiences; it can analyze data to inform educational strategies, identify at-risk students, and measure the effectiveness of different teaching approaches; AI-powered virtual assistants and chatbots can provide support and facilitate remote learning. And blah blah blah…
None of these things address Freire’s transformational concerns for existential authenticity. So for now I reserve the last word for Paulo speaking to the professionals who must decide for themselves what teaching and learning are together and separately:
“The fear of freedom is greater still in professionals who have not yet discovered for themselves the invasive nature of their action, and who are told that their action is dehumanizing. Not infrequently, especially at the point of decoding concrete situations, training course participants ask the coordinator in an irritated manner: ‘Where do you think you’re steering us, anyway?’ The coordinator isn't trying to ‘steer’ them anywhere; it is just that in facing a concrete situation as a problem, the participants begin to realize that if their analysis of the situation goes any deeper they will either have to divest themselves of their myths, or reaffirm them” (Freire, 1971, p.157-158).